I've no news I'm afraid, but I do have a question: The lander itself has instruments for UV astronomy and plasmasphere investigations. If Yutu has gone to the land of eternal crunchy lettuce, how long will the lander mission continue to run without the rover?

The lander was intended to last for a year. It doesn't need the rover - and the rover doesn't need the lander, it could be completely independent as they hoped it could travel several km away from the lander.

Thanks Phil. It's good to know the lander is designed to run for a year. I was as much wondering if the Chinese space agency would consider the lander investigations worth the effort and money of running on their own, or if they were just a sideshow to the rover that would be kept going as part of the overall budget of rover/lander mission, but not as just a lander. Paranoia, perhaps, but sometimes these things are politically influenced and the reasons why experiments are turned off aren't always clear.

I'm going to have to uncross some things for Yutu, I'm starting to ache...…..

I've no news I'm afraid, but I do have a question: The lander itself has instruments for UV astronomy and plasmasphere investigations. If Yutu has gone to the land of eternal crunchy lettuce, how long will the lander mission continue to run without the rover?

CE-3 Lander will run one year , while china engineers had thought extended to two year

Doesn't sounds like a convincing source. I think that unless Xinhua News et al. release something, we probably can't be sure that it's gone. And all the official sources are still silent (even for the lander!).......

Doesn't sounds like a convincing source. I think that unless Xinhua News et al. release something, we probably can't be sure that it's gone. And all the official sources are still silent (even for the lander!).......

And just after I wrote that there's this news claiming that the rover is showing "signs of activity" - with Xinhua News shown as the source! So maybe it's not dead? (remember that we don't even know what happened to it!)

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